Okay - so I think we need to catch hold of this project firmly and make a big, bold decision in terms of its recipe. As expressed at the crit, character design as a formal pipeline doesn't excite you in any way, it puts you off and it encourages you to stay in a sort of 'boring' zone, when I think you want to be more filmic and more expressive, and probably get some quicker, more gratifying results.
As promised/threatened (!?!), I said I'd compel you to translate some of your early expressive thumbnails into Maya in a sort of 'quick and dirty' way - i.e. I don't want you to create more drawings in pipeline sense, I want you to recreate the drawings in 3D space.
An example of what I mean can be found here on the YPGTTO blog, where a piece of concept art was turned into a very quick 3D scene:
I want you to do the same thing for the following images: the bottom right thumbnail on the page with the crosses (so opposite the white cross), where you've got all that grey sky and trenches below - get rid of the soldiers, just seek to create that illustrative space in 3D - keeping as much as possible the qualities of the drawing. The second image - the 'red flare' thumbnail - again, get rid of the soldiers, just go for the space.
In terms of 'mixed media' check out this animation 'Dad's Dead':
https://vimeo.com/18659961
I mentioned the work of Tony Oursler today - the guy you projects onto simple forms - to great and often disturbing effect - I honestly think that projecting footage/faces onto simple theatrical 3D elements could be a hugely exciting way to go on this project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HjR1X0a4e4
I think you need to think about using Maya camera projection - and also working with Alan to actually project or wrap elements with moving footage as a means of getting the soldiers into your world, but not in some pedestrian way, but in an exciting 'mix-media' sense.
And this is hugely important: the poem is a character in your film - the vocal performance of it and the duration it gives you. You need to get the poem to a voice-over artist immediately, so you you've got this 'fixed element' of your project in place. Start here: https://www.fiverr.com/categories/music-audio/voice-overs?source=category_tree&page=1&filter=rating
Get it done for next week!!! Once you've got it, you can start to build a meaningful visual response to it.
So 1) Voice Over 2) Recreate your drawings as 3D spaces, but allow them to look like your drawings and 3) Investigate the ways and means of working with archive imagery and actual film within a digital set/projection context. I'm not just talking about comping footage over a 3D world in AE, I'm talking about Oursler-style stuff :)
Evening Dan,
ReplyDeleteOkay - so I think we need to catch hold of this project firmly and make a big, bold decision in terms of its recipe. As expressed at the crit, character design as a formal pipeline doesn't excite you in any way, it puts you off and it encourages you to stay in a sort of 'boring' zone, when I think you want to be more filmic and more expressive, and probably get some quicker, more gratifying results.
As promised/threatened (!?!), I said I'd compel you to translate some of your early expressive thumbnails into Maya in a sort of 'quick and dirty' way - i.e. I don't want you to create more drawings in pipeline sense, I want you to recreate the drawings in 3D space.
An example of what I mean can be found here on the YPGTTO blog, where a piece of concept art was turned into a very quick 3D scene:
http://caaone.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/ypgtto-preproduction-test-01-simplicity.html
I want you to do the same thing for the following images: the bottom right thumbnail on the page with the crosses (so opposite the white cross), where you've got all that grey sky and trenches below - get rid of the soldiers, just seek to create that illustrative space in 3D - keeping as much as possible the qualities of the drawing. The second image - the 'red flare' thumbnail - again, get rid of the soldiers, just go for the space.
In terms of 'mixed media' check out this animation 'Dad's Dead':
https://vimeo.com/18659961
I mentioned the work of Tony Oursler today - the guy you projects onto simple forms - to great and often disturbing effect - I honestly think that projecting footage/faces onto simple theatrical 3D elements could be a hugely exciting way to go on this project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HjR1X0a4e4
I think you need to think about using Maya camera projection - and also working with Alan to actually project or wrap elements with moving footage as a means of getting the soldiers into your world, but not in some pedestrian way, but in an exciting 'mix-media' sense.
And this is hugely important: the poem is a character in your film - the vocal performance of it and the duration it gives you. You need to get the poem to a voice-over artist immediately, so you you've got this 'fixed element' of your project in place.
Start here:
https://www.fiverr.com/categories/music-audio/voice-overs?source=category_tree&page=1&filter=rating
Get it done for next week!!! Once you've got it, you can start to build a meaningful visual response to it.
So 1) Voice Over 2) Recreate your drawings as 3D spaces, but allow them to look like your drawings and 3) Investigate the ways and means of working with archive imagery and actual film within a digital set/projection context. I'm not just talking about comping footage over a 3D world in AE, I'm talking about Oursler-style stuff :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oC8GbblIBk
ReplyDeletehttp://owendaveydraws.tumblr.com/post/50365213606
Carl Jung - Jungian influence in animation...
ReplyDeletehttp://creatingmandalas.com/psychology-of-the-mandala
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitney_(filmmaker)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whitney_(animator)